Steps to Create an SEO PR Campaign
Successful SEO requires public relations or PR. When you think about it, a lot of what SEO experts do is PR. They pitch guest posts to bloggers, interact with influencers, and email people to get links and mentions.
A great many publications today are moving online which opens a whole new space for collaboration between PR and SEO. Quality content and outreach are more important than ever and form an integral part of SEO success.
If you’d like to create an SEO PR campaign to increase rankings, traffic, and revenue, follow this step-by-step plan.
Establish Your Goals
The first step involves establishing what goals you’d like to see as a direct result of your activity. Maybe you’d like to increase your rankings, get more quality inbound links to your site, or diversify your backlink profile. Map your goals out from the start and ensure everything you do is working toward them.
Define Your Target Audience
Since your goals will mesh with your target audience, now it’s time to define who you want to communicate with through your PR. You can define your ideal customer by their age, gender, location, interests, digital habits, education, and income.
Craft Your Key Message
Your key message is at the heart of your PR campaign because it’s what you are trying to communicate. A good key message is easy to understand, communicate, remember, and act on.
You should be communicating your key message with each of your campaign goals. For example: For the goal of boosting brand visibility, the key message can be ‘(your brand) has just opened a brand new store in (city name) at record speed’.
Create a Content Roadmap for your Campaigns
Now it’s time to create a content roadmap aka editorial calendar to offer clarity and direction to your digital PR campaign. Your content roadmap should include a list of key messages. It should also contain the contact info for the publications, bloggers, influencers, etc you plan to reach out to. It also should feature the roll-out dates.
Create Content
It’s not an easy job to create high-quality content but it can be done with perseverance. Think outside the box and create innovative, helpful, and interesting content to get users’ attention online. Your content should be captivating to spike the interest of your target audience.
Make Your Pitches
This is where you start your PR outreach campaign via email. Journalists at small to medium-sized publications, social media influencers, and bloggers are always on the lookout for interesting, original stories so make your pitch to these people. Personalise your pitch and write an awesome subject line to maximise the chances that your story will be picked up.
Keep the email body short and sweet. Use the person’s name and make reference to a piece of content they wrote. Briefly explain what you’re offering. Explain why your content would be perfect for their audience in the context of news headlines, the time of the year, societal trends, etc.
By following these steps you’ll stand a good chance of getting the coverage you want and need. When you get it right, you can boost brand awareness and increase your rankings, website traffic, and revenue.